Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday May 05, 2010 @07:55AM
from the in-this-corner dept.

aylons writes "Just after Adobe released videos showing off the content-aware feature of Photoshop CS5, the GIMP community answered by showing the resynthesizer plugin, which has been available for some time and can do a similar job. However, are they really comparable? (In original Portuguese, but really, the images are pretty much self-explaining.) Compare them side by side removing the same objects from different kinds of images. Results do vary, but the most interesting part may be seeing the different results and trying to understand the logic of each algorithm."

But the review was from a pro-Linux site, so fairness isn't something I should have expected.

Why do you think it was a pro-Linux site? Just because one of the sample pictures had toy penguins in it? I looked at the first 5 pages of the site and it was mostly articles about Windows OS and Windows graphics applications with a few stories about Apple stuff and Twitter. Not a single article about Linux.

Wait till you hear from pseudo-professionals who would trash GIMP at any given opportunity. Clearly, GIMP was ahead of PS on this so called revolutionary concept, but nobody made a big fuss about it. And then hell broke loose when PS announced it - the earlier thread on it was full of multiple orgasms by the same 'professionals'.

Wait till you hear from pseudo-professionals who would trash GIMP at any given opportunity. Clearly, GIMP was ahead of PS on this so called revolutionary concept, but nobody made a big fuss about it. And then hell broke loose when PS announced it - the earlier thread on it was full of multiple orgasms by the same 'professionals'.

[Puts on pseudo-intellectual trolling suit, with built in PS orgasm attachment]

Well, that would be because you do printing in the physical world and not in the plane of platonic perfection where, apparently, all of the GIMP print jobs get sent to (I assume this since I have never seen, in 15 years in the biz, an actual print job made with GIMP). A cloud-filled wonderland where 4-color separations happen by magic, trapping is done for free by dedicated itinerant monks (trappists... get it?) and fluffy bunnies pre-flight your print jobs while you drink frothy mugs filled from the free-a

I think the main problem most "pseudo-professionals" have with GIMP is familiarity. I myself use OpenOffice.org regularly and the transition from Microsoft Office was extremely simple - download it and start using it. The same is not true of GIMP since it's UI is so different than Photoshops. These "pseudo-professionals", almost certainly have a long history with Photoshop, so understand how to do things using it's UI, but likely don't even know where to start with GIMP and write it off as useless. It is closed minded, but certainly understandable on a professional/semi-professional level. Blender seems to suffer the same problem, since it's UI is vastly different than any other 3D program I've tried (although since there are more available than in the photo-editing world no one program has a "monopoly" on the UI so it's not quite as bed).

Most FOSS doesn't tend to have this problem because it either does a specific task that has no industry standard UI, Emulates the industry standard UI (like OpenOffice.org) or is so simple that it makes little difference how the UI is designed as long as it works (things like 7-zip for example - its function is to open and create archives. You don't have 100s of filters and tools to use so everything can be put into a couple of menus and not be confusing).

I'd definitely agree. First photo editing software I used was Jasc's Paintshop Pro. It was dead simple and everything seemed intuitive. Then I tried Photoshop. Compared to Paintshop Pro, it was a UI nightmare and I gave up on Photoshop pretty fast. GIMP wasn't any better; I only really gave GIMP a chance when I had pretty much stopped using Windows.

I actually find Paintshop Pro very close to Photoshop. In fact most graphics applications are quite exchangable, user-interface wise. Except Gimp, but I understand even they have a reasonable decent user interface these days.

I've logged way more hours (as a hobbyist) in GIMP than I have in photoshop. I still dislike it mostly for the window management (which i've heard is better or at least changeable recently, but I haven't had a reason to go check) but a lot of other things (eg the file saving process) strike me as clumsy.

On a non-UI note, I wish it'd use multiple cores the way Lightroom (and I presume photoshop) happily will.

Look, it's clearly a case of the open source community failing to innovate and just copying the competition. They're getting so desperate now that they even resorting to copying features from propriety software a couple of years before they appear..

I'm a Photoshop user who is also pro-GIMP - I don't use it much, but I do evangelize the GIMP, Inkscape, and many other FOSS/FAIB software. I personally don't use a lot of these tools because I need more advanced tools, but I recognize both their usefulness for casual users and the benefit they serve as gateway drugs to the FOSS world.

I had an orgasm or two when I saw the PS video when it came out. I had another when I discovered the GIMP has a similar plug-in.

Wait till you hear from pseudo-professionals who would trash GIMP at any given opportunity. Clearly, GIMP was ahead of PS on this so called revolutionary concept, but nobody made a big fuss about it. And then hell broke loose when PS announced it - the earlier thread on it was full of multiple orgasms by the same 'professionals'.

For consumer, for all practical purporses Gimp plugin does not exist and PS wins by having feature that Gimp does not.

Why?

It is plugin. As such, you have to know it exists in order to get it. Even worse, you might not even know what you are looking for if you actually look for that function. You can not just discover it while "playing with filters" and your best shot is asking on some forums ("UTFG" being mostl likely reply) if you do not just use clone tool by hand (something a lot more intuitive and going

I even know it exists, what it's called, where it's website is, and I still have no idea how to download or install it. I've been using Arch Linux for several years, I can build packages, I can do./configure or./autogen.sh installs, I'm not retarded. I admit I haven't done much looking into it, but I have no idea how the plugin system works on Gimp, and it certainly isn't intuitive. I would say the barrier to entry for this functionality is even higher than you suggest.

You claim to know where the website is... The FIRST PAGE of the website gives install instructions, source download, and RPM/DEB packages.

Why do people complain when they are too stupid/lazy to take 5 seconds to read 1 page? Honestly if you can't be bothered to read 2 lines of text to learn how to install something, you probably should be using Photoshop anyway.

You claim to know where the website is... The FIRST PAGE of the website gives install instructions, source download, and RPM/DEB packages.

Why do people complain when they are too stupid/lazy to take 5 seconds to read 1 page? Honestly if you can't be bothered to read 2 lines of text to learn how to install something, you probably should be using Photoshop anyway.

That, most people are better off using Photoshop, would be exactly the point the GP was implicitly trying to make. Calling the GP stupid and lazy does no one any good: it makes you look rude, makes the GP feel bad, and lowers the tone of discussion. Seriously, no one benefits from that, and everyone in the open source community suffers.

People generally do not like to listen to criticism, and often miss the real message when faced with a complaint like, "I don't know how this works." The real message isn'

How is it difficult to download and extract it when even holds the same folder structure as Gimp so you don't even have to navigate folders and move files. You just extract into program files. Hell that's easier than some PS plugins.

Turning the screw: $1
Knowing which screw and which way to turn it: $199

I'm not a linux user. Are all plugins for all programs accessed that way?

Quite often, yes. I'm sure if you look hard enough though you'll be able to find ones that aren't pre-packaged and then you'd need to read the web page from where you download the plugin. In this case it'd be somewhat similar to what is required for some PS plugins.

Knowing which screw and which way to turn it: $199

Just as with most things, some superficial knowledge is helpful but again, Linux software is no orphan in this respect and is also not always as hard as some would like to try to make out.

It's in the AUR [archlinux.org] as a package for Arch. I don't even use Arch and it took me thirty seconds to find this. It's the very first page when you Google for "arch linux resynthesizer." [tinyurl.com] You want to be 1337 "cause I use Arch?" Learn to Google.

Hell, even if you do know about it, good luck actually using it. After 15 minutes of apt-get fiddling and chanting mantras, I'm still unable to get the damn thing working in GIMP 2.6.7. For a feature whose primary purpose is to save you time, it sure could do with an FONT OF GOD sized install guide that explains how to (actually) get it working.

I installed it pretty easy under Ubuntu (9.10):
$ sudo apt-get install gimp-resynthesizer
However, when I first tried using it, I was using the Filter->Map->Resynthesize... menu option which kind of works, but isn't so great. I had to google to find a good explanation of how to use it. What you should do is:
1. Install as above,
2. Select area of image to remove,
3. Use Filters->Enhance->Smart remove selection...

And to be clear about this - it is fucking awesome. Seriously! I'm not usually _that_ impressed with things (I'm far too old!), but this goes into total witch-craft territory, it is *that* good!

If anyone has managed to install this plugin under Windows, I'd like to know the instructions for doing so (not for me... it's for my *friends*... honest!!!).

There's also shortcuts available from Script-Fu > Enhance > Smart enlarge... / Smart remove selection... / Smart sharpen...But the results out of those can be a bit iffy (output in general can be a bit iffy, but I do prefer the manual control).

The author writes on the plugin's page that he doesn't have time to maintain it any longer, and is looking for someone to take over. Apparently it was a thesis of some sort and now it's done (sad fate of much interesting academic software).

I knew about it ages ago when I first got into Gimp. Like Firefox, if I'm told it has plugins then I look for them. Would you argue that Adblock is at some sort of disadvantage for not being included in Firefox?

A while back I decided to try this out on Windows. Well the first step was to find a version that would be compatible with windows, then I had to get a mirror, figure out the install location, research why it wasn't the latest version, download a newer version from another site, research why it wasn't working (was sampling from the top left corner only), find a fix, modify script files to include the fix, and finally it was working.
While I did find it really cool once I had it working, it's not the easy

Most of the 'prosumers' I've seen dismiss Gimp just repeat stuff they've read on Slashdot, knowing that it makes them look +5, insightful. They're probably as lazy when it comes to learning new tools as they are when it comes to independent thought.

Most professionals, who have narrow yet deep specialization in particular field, are very very reluctant to learn new tools. Yet always keep an eye on them.

No we're not. We're happy to learn a new tool, especially when it saves us time/energy. That's why apps like ZBrush, Mudbox, 3D Coat, Modo, etc manage to find a market. Double bonus if it's cheap or free. The problem isn't reluctance, it's lack of time. And when an app goes out of it's way to be counter-intuitive, it's frustrating, especially when that change has no obvious benefit. (Look up ZBrush 2's history for a peek into why somebody would bother to accept BS like that.) Both the GIMP and Blender suffer from this problem to a maddening level. However, Open Office and FireFox are great examples of the other end of the spectrum. FireFox, in particular, is familiar enough to IE users but provides more functionality. GIMP's differences aren't 'quirks'.

It doesn't really matter. They will buy photoshop and diss Gimp as long as they THINK it's an important feature, regardless of whether it actually is at all.

It's one of the great differences between proprietary software and open source software. If Gimp is indeed still 8 bit, it may be because the developers have found that that 16 bit color is not a great advantage to image editing. Meanwhile Adobe has found that 16 bit color is a great advantage to selling copies of photoshop.

If Gimp is indeed still 8 bit, it may be because the developers have found that that 16 bit color is not a great advantage to image editing.

It still it, mostly because switching the engine over to something else is a fuckton of work, but it's finally underway. There is no question about 16-bit being useful, and I'm looking forward to the day when GIMP finally supports it. Meanwhile I'll make sure to do most of my adjustments in Ufraw. However I suspect many 'prosumers' and too many professionals don't have

Damn right, people are completely unaware of exactly what increasing the number of bits in a fixed-point format will do. They are assigning magical properties to it. It does nothing except make the problems a bit smaller and harder to see, possibly hiding them until it is too late and they bite you.

If you are using 16 bits on modern processors you should be using half floats, representing the linear value of the color (ie double the value makes the image twice as bright or doubles the exposure). Using integ

"That's a bit of a limitation when my camera can shoot in 12-bit color..."

Not a limitation at all. If you need 16-bit color to manipulate the hell out of your picture to reduce color round off error, then maybe capturing a good shot to begin with will solve that problem. And most devices to view that picture are low dynamic range anyway. So, gee, just think how MUCH better your picture would be in 128-bit floating point color!!! Hardly, you can't even see all the color differences of 16-bit.

OK. I need to capture a scene that has some really bright highlights and some really shadowed areas. I need to retain as much detail as possible in both areas. Fill flash is not an option, nor is doing a multiple exposure HDR shot. I suppose 12 bit is NOT superior to 8 bit, and I just need to learn to be a better photographer, right?

Not a limitation at all. If you need 16-bit color to manipulate the hell out of your picture to reduce color round off error, then maybe capturing a good shot to begin with will solve that problem.

Ah, the old "if you do everything perfectly in the field, you don't need fancy features in the studio" argument. The equally-inaccurate friend of "I don't have to do anything right in the field, because I can fix it all in the studio".

The display on my DSLR is tiny. Being able to work with 16-bit-per-channel colou

What limits FLOSS adoption is what limits any kind of software: fit for a particular purpose. The more functionality and compatibiluty, the better,

Not that the Gimp isn't any different from Photoshop in the sense that Photoshop is multi-windowed in Mac OS X too (Adobe "We must use a single window on Windows because the Windows WM is absolutely retarted)

The "good enough" problem is a bit unique for GIMP though (not exclusively related to this plugin, but in general). MOST people can get by fine with image editors that are FAR simpler than either GIMP or Photoshop in their everyday life. On Windows I like Paint.NET - a program that's install file is a whopping 3.5MB. I'll admit though that with the newer version that comes in Windows 7, for quick stuff I'll often use regular Windows Paint. At home on Linux I still use GIMP, but that's just because I hav

Maybe once they straighten out their UI issues it'll get better. GIMP has been around seemingly forever - people have criticized the UI from the start, and it's STILL never been addressed.

People will find a new pet issue to criticize. What most of them really mean is "I don't care, I don't want to try anything new", but that doesn't sound good, so they will always find a new issue as long as GIMP isn't a carbon copy of the latest version of Photoshop. For the record, there are no serious UI issues beyond it being unfamiliar, there is a ton of minor ones, but to see them you actually have to spend some time with the program, so unsurprisingly they are not the target of much criticism.

For the record, there are no serious UI issues beyond it being unfamiliar, there is a ton of minor ones, but to see them you actually have to spend some time with the program, so unsurprisingly they are not the target of much criticism.

If 'some time' is more than 10 minutes.. sure.

I use The GIMP. A lot. Almost exclusively, in fact. My secondary editor? Picture Publisher 5.0a from 1995. It's 16bit. No, that's not the color bitdepth - that's the "Was made for Windows 3.x" bit. Only reason is because it still does some things better/faster. (Tertiary is a toss-up between several.. actually, if IrfanView would count as an 'editor', it'd be 3rd).

I'm familiar with its interface, I'm familiar with how it differs from Photoshop, I simply moved the floating dialogs around on the screen with a big central window to get a more familiar feel.. no problem.

But it still only took me 10 minutes to realize there's a -huge- UI-related workflow issue with The Gimp...No. Unified. Transform tool.

In The Gimp, you may:A. ScaleB. RotateC. ShearD. Distort (called the Perspective tool, but as each corner point is independent, I'm not too sure about that term).

Pick any one - but only one.No, you can not scale down -and- rotate*. You can scale down - and then you can rotate. Two operations - twice the filtering. In fact, you'd probably want to rotate first, and -then- scale, just so the rotation operation has more data to work on for a higher quality result.( * unless you want to get crackin' with a calculator and determine the new corner pixels and use the Distort (perspective) transform. )

Apparently it's on the list for 2.8 - so here's hoping.( I'd point to the gui.gimp.org topic on the unified transform tool, but that site is - once again - blank. )

Ideally it would never actually put anything into pixels until you requested it to be (so that a layer scaled down to 10% and then back up by 1000% would simply yield the original image give-or-take some float precision errors), but that's much further away and not really UI/workflow related.

This is it. A lot of people will say Gimp can't do print catalogues and all sorts of high end stuff that the vast majority of people don't use which makes it irrelevant. A company that needs those things can easily afford PS and imo Gimp isn't really going after them.

The problem is, Photoshop sucks, too. It's the best tool out there for what I do (photorealistic painting and compositing for film), but it's not very good. The whole layer paradigm simply sucks, many features are nice-but-not-quite-thought-out, and overall the devs seem to spend way too much time bringing in new nifty tools, resulting in bloat and a lack of focus. I'd love to like Gimp, but it's not even as useful as PS for me (try painting an 8k frame with any reasonable brush size) and sadly there is abs

PS had similar features (i.e. the healing brush and similar tools) since CS3 I think.Nonetheless, neither the old nor the new tools on both PS and Gimp seem to be useful for anything but a quick preview before doing it correct manually.

These tools are good for removing small details in a much larger picture. Other than that, they fail simply because they can't invent new content, they can only make it look like the surrounding area.

Trying to remove a penguin from a cup when there's nothing in the surroundin

8/10/2009: I haven't really been keeping up with API changes in the GIMP, or with emails people send me. If you emailed me and I haven't replied, I'm sorry. If you want to take over as maintainer of this project, email me. Other emails will probably continue to sit unread in my inbox.

It works reasonably well, but be aware of the limitations. Resynthesizer was originally made for texture enlargement, so you are best of working in chunks where you want a uniform texture. If it keeps pulling in texture that doesn't match you might have to create a layer isolating the matching texture and use the plug in itself (instead of the "Smart Remove" tool it is bundled with) to specify that layer as the texture source, make sure the source and target layers color spaces match, it will refuse to use

Did you change the default memory requirements in the preference? I scan 6x7 (cm) and 4x5 (inch) negatives and get 12000x10000ish images and edit them in the GIMP all the time. No crashes. Yes, I still shoot medium and large format BW film.

It should be named content Un Aware. It's not aware of what's behind the hole, so it's extrapolating. Even in this image: http://blog.ultradownloads.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Rua-do-Aljube_Blog2.jpg [ultradownloads.com.br] where CS5 is touted to have completely replaced the sign pole on the right, the car now has two lion symbols, identical shadows, tiles seem to fall off the church roof, a tree trunk is the wrong color, and there is something that looks like steam coming from the antenna. Neither of the effects looks

You don't need a slider bar, all you need is to select larger or smaller regions. Start with the larger region, then work your way down to smaller ones until it looks like a real image. You didn't think it was going to do the work for you, did you? This ain't CSI. I tried out resynthesizer when this story broke and found it to be pretty darned useful if you use it in this way; I assume CS5's feature is similar in practice.

You expected flawless results from the "push the bar", "heavy" challenge? *sigh*

I was talking about the one case where the impossible almost happened. At a quick glance, in the CS5 frame, that sign post is missing. It did better in that case then with most of the others except the car and human in the first picture. There are obvious flaws in the CS5 algo; taking small things like the lion symbol and copying them in new places when a simple blend parallel to the adjacent lines would have been much better. It's obviously an algorithm designed for the chaos of nature rather than the

There are obvious flaws in the CS5 algo; taking small things like the lion symbol and copying them in new places when a simple blend parallel to the adjacent lines would have been much better. It's obviously an algorithm designed for the chaos of nature rather than the line-heavy world of man.

It's an automated "stamp tool". It's a first iteration of it, so we'll have to wait for revisions before it offers more options, but we'll always have to go in and do touch-ups if we want to go near perfection.

I just think that it did a pretty good job at a glance, but yeah, if you nitpick, there's plenty to pick at.

It does a reasonable job of guessing the content based on a single image. For better results, you'd want one of the tools which uses scene descriptors formed from image derivatives to find matching segments in a huge library of images and paste them together, using some sort of Poisson blurring to mix the edges in. I have seen this demonstrated, but I forget the name of the tool which was used. I do recall that it used a library of 2.3M images of northern Mediterranean towns for its example data set, and re

For the record, I'm getting results from gimp-resynth that are similar to the CS5 results. I just used "Free select tool" [aka lasso] to quickly select *around* the outside of the pole -- being careful not to select anything within the pole -- and then used "Filter->Enhance->Smart remove selection..." and it does a pretty good job. One thing I have noticed with Resynth is that if you undo it and then reapply it (NOT redo), then it'll probably look a bit different from the first attempt, so there's a r

Note: I'm as far away from being a graphics crack as the next guy, but at least a basic understanding of your tools is useful. I created this image quick and dirty with the GIMP resyth. And I certainly can draw ugly pictures in CS5 to prove that GIMP is superior. Such comparisons are completely meaningless though.

The notion behind Content Aware fill is to sell PS to managers who don't want to hire an art department. The videos will make people think they can click a button to fix all of the problems in their crappy images. Knowledgeable PS users understand there's never going to be a button for "fix it". There's no way a couple of clicks will replace what an hour of work by someone who really understand the software.

Then people will say, "Look how Gimp quickly put together a crappy imitation of Photoshop's content aware!"

It's a lose-lose situation now, unless Resynth gets much better and offers results at least as good as Photoshop's in every situation, which is probably not going to happen anyway: since the algorithms have different strong points, each will be better in a different situation.

FWIW, I've tried resynth and the "pole" picture [ultradownloads.com.br] looked pretty much the same as CS5 when I tried it, so I'm guessing the author of TFA made a poor selection. I've also previously tried the image from the CS5 promo video [youtube.com] with the woman sat on the park bench and I got almost much identical results.

The only area where I'd say Gimp lags is (1). the UI isn't as easy [both for this plugin, and more generally], and (2). the plugin only makes use of a single CPU core.

The real news was not the ability to do this kind of interpolation, but the fact that's built-in and integrated in the workflow.For Photoshop, Alien Skin Image Doctor has been available for years (2002 maybe). What matters for me is that I no longer need to use a plugin and I can use this smart fills in several scenarios, including as a brush to remove fine things like wires.

The same goes with another new feature in PS CS5, the new selection tools. There were at least 2 or 3 plugins (like Fluid Mask) that could do tricky selections, but now it's built-in.Same with the new lens corrections, no need for PTLens anymore, I can even profile my own lenses using the new lens profile creator from the labs.

I don't want to sound like I'm defending Adobe here, I used to hate them. For 10 years I've been using Corel Photo-Paint (from v3 to X3) plus a few others including The Gimp. In the end I realized that despite its shortcomings, PS really is the best tool for the job. When you're under pressure to deliver, small differences add up.

I know this is off topic, but I am not going to bother joining a GIMP forum.

I installed GIMP (windows) yesterday. I wanted to downscale some images and do a light USM, but GIMP downscaled images came out looking over-sharpened before I even got to the USM step. I know downscaling does make images appear sharper if the original was a bit soft.

But this is compared to downscaling in other programs. GIMP output looked over-sharpened with artifacts.

I could find no setting that indicated it was doing any USM on scaling, so I promptly un-installed GIMP, since it can't do something this basic without degrading the image.

It always amazes me that the websites for wonderful FOSS projects can be so damn ugly.

The Resynthesizer website [logarithmic.net] is a great example. It's not so much the site itself I find ugly, but the logo.They make a Gimp plug-in for crying out loud, they should be able to whip up something more appealing.

I get that programmers just don't care about their website or logo, only about coding the actual software.But that kind of attitude is keeping some FOSS projects from becoming popular with the general population.

8/10/2009: I haven't really been keeping up with API changes in the GIMP, or with emails people send me. If you emailed me and I haven't replied, I'm sorry. If you want to take over as maintainer of this project, email me. Other emails will probably continue to sit unread in my inbox.

I am a proponent of FLOSS and I want the gimp to be great. But it does not matter until Gimp gets the basics right. Until the underlying pixel engine of Gimp can give Photoshop's pixel engine a run for it's money then the gee wiz features don't mean squat for anyone trying to do real work. Bottom line get back to me when the gimp can do full 16 bit per channel images throughout the entire program as quickly and efficiently as Photoshop can.

This is one of the biggest problems with FLOSS the volunteer programmers go and work on the neat gee wiz stuff because that's whats more fun and easier. Getting people to do the hard unsexy stuff just does not happen in a timely fashion. The number of people who are good enough at the engineering to build a really solid pixel engine are quite rare. And the number of those people who are willing to do that in their free time gratis appears to be even more rare. I say this in a goading manner because I want someone to take up the challenge.. someone that can really make that happen.

My Portuguese isn't exactly good (working on it), so I can't tell if this is explained in the article, but as I've used resynthesizer before, I noticed that their results looked far worse than what I usually experience.
I've only tested one image, but there GIMP performed *much* better than what that blog would let you believe.
I resynthesized the same area in the large picture, so for comparison, look at the original compared to this - then contrast to the small version supposedly done by gimp in the bottom right corner: Original [ultradownloads.com.br] My attempt [geeksbynature.dk] (warning: 2.7MB, saved as PNG to avoid further artifacts).

... and you're basing this statement on what? From the pictures in TFA, I'd say in the cases where this feature is useful (which would be the "shadow removing" picture), GIMP wins by a slight margin. In useless tests ( extreme variations in texture, like the church picture), Photoshop *might* be slightly better, but the result is in no way useable. Where Photoshop have a slight advantage is in the UI of the plugin, although resynthesizer isn't exactly rocket surgery neither.

Photoshop CS5 retail price for non-student starts at $699 (which, by the way, translates to €1015,40 in Adobe-land if you try to buy it in France, instead of the €544,60 it would be in a country using old fashioned mathematics and regular currency values).